


Witness

by Hth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel
Genre: Future Fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders what it's like, to come that late to love, and to get used to it before you lose it. Faith remembers being in love, when she was young and hot-blooded. When she didn't define her whole life by being the oldest, the big sister, the one who – watches? Is that what she is now – Watcher?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witness

Seattle, WA  
2019

She hitch-hikes into town, following a breadcrumb trail of rumors about the Dark Angel. Just hearing the name makes Faith’s heart pound a little faster, and by now almost nothing does that. In spite of giving it the old college try, she’s gotten jaded over the years. Life doesn’t amaze her, front to back, the way it used to – just the fact that she’s still alive. That’s a little amazing. The rest of it.... On a good day. On a good day, Faith can still be knocked for a loop by the sheer scope and force of life as she knows it.

And it’s a good day when, after almost six months of no-call, no-show, she hears that name for the first time: Dark Angel. Young, beautiful, unstoppable. Righteous. Hero. Oh, yeah. Yeah, _finally_.  Jesus Christ, finally. Take me there.

_Blast from the past – what a handle.  _Dark Angel_.  On impulse, before she kicks out from Tulsa on her way to Seattle, she gives the man himself a call, but she gets the machine. Okay. She likes thinking of him out, doing his thing, walking the dog or washing his car or some such shit, enjoying the California sun. She likes thinking of him the way he looked the last time she saw him, crow’s feet around his eyes, the grey hairs looking stark white against the black ones, his bulk evenly distributed between carefully maintained muscles and a wicked fondness for Reeses peanut butter cups. Her throat is a little tight as she hangs up the pay phone._

She makes Seattle a little after midnight, knowing she’s gonna be sleeping on the streets tonight, but not really caring. She’s a little sick of hotel rooms, to tell the truth. Spending the night on the prowl will help her get a bead on the city. Faith knows how to size up a crowd, and damn, but Seattle has those. Crowds. Everywhere. It’s enough to make a person twitch, sort of – so many people. And they all seem so young.

From a distance, at night, Faith knows she looks young, too, young enough to move among them easily. It’s the grace, the ease of movement, the slight swagger that implies a little foolhardiness. Up close, of course, she looks her age. Pushing forty, litheness turned to lankiness, whip-thin and just as tough, crow’s-feet of her own.

_The history, such as it is, of Faith’s kind, was passed on to her like so many things were – Buffy to Giles to Wesley to Faith. She’s ready to believe it; three more anal-retentive people Faith has never known, especially when it comes to Research, capital-R, like it’s a freaking sacrament. So she knows, she believes unequivocally, that she is the oldest Slayer. Not the oldest Slayer in the world, but the oldest Slayer in _history_.  Ever. That’s what keeps her amazed._

There’s noise, too, in Seattle. Everywhere, a dull, bass-heavy throb of music and engines and yelling. It’s the sound of a whole city screaming in anger, Faith thinks, and then she shivers, because it’s strange for thoughts like that, subjective, impressionable thoughts, to come out of her head. They feel like someone else’s thoughts.

But there they are, and there they stay. Seattle roars like a wild thing, it does not go gently into the post-apocalyptic night, it won’t forget what came before the collapse, it won’t forgive anything or anyone. It hates, purely, more purely than any human ever could.

_The last time Faith cried, it had to have been, oh, seven or eight years ago now, and it was when Wes died. She got the call – they would never say exactly how it happened, just that it was "the way he would’ve wanted," which Faith guessed meant in a fight, saving – someone. Some stranger, maybe? Probably. And she was sad, sure, because old Wes had been the one who made all this possible, got her set up, passed on everything she needed to know to take over after the Watcher’s Council fell apart entirely, its neck snapped by managerial ineptitude, the excesses of those Ops fuckers, and the psychic hit it took when its Slayers, each in her own special way, told them to go blow themselves. Faith wouldn’t be able to do any of the things she’d done over the last fifteen years if it hadn’t been for Wesley, and so she was sad to see him go._

_It took a few hours to sink in, for all hell to break loose. There were things pounding at the walls of the dark oubliette of Faith’s past, things she ignored out of habit, until she couldn’t anymore, and she did the thing she always strove not to do: she remembered._

_Then she cried. Sobbed. Screamed. Beat her fists raw and bloody against the hotel room walls. Screamed some more. Cried some more – no, _wept_.  Because how could it be, what did it all mean, that Wesley had forgiven her, become her fucking _friend_? She was so old, unimaginably old by Slayer standards, and she’d seen and done so much, and yet the world was so unfathomably strange. It made no sense. It defied everything she learned – at every turn, she was confronted by something that seemed to challenge everything that went before. She learned love, and it turned to hate, so she learned rage and it turned to sorrow, so she learned pain and the world gave her hope, and she learned atonement, and got grace._

_Wept. Prayed. God, just give me the fucking _answer_.  Just show me how this works. I want to learn; I’m begging. Show me how to go through life, what it’s all about. I’m an idiot. Make me understand._

_No Zen master came along to offer her wisdom, though. No angel, dark or otherwise, undead or otherwise, appeared before her. The hotel manager banged on her wall and told her to shut the fuck up in there, and eventually she did. That was in Louisville, Kentucky, while Faith was looking for her fourth Slayer._

With the city rattling apart under the force of its own grief all around her, she expects that her little ritual will get some attention – will maybe be for more than just her this time. And she’s right. They’re gathering all around her, hovering, as elusive and pliant as shadows, watching her throw down her backpack, watching her rattle the fire escape to check its sturdiness before she jumps.

A little wind catches her by surprise, and she sways gently, holding the rail with one hand, her feet finding a comfortable spot between the bars; one heavy, stacked boot-heel catches the iron with a dull clang, and suddenly she has the urge to look over her shoulder and down.

She sees what she expected to see: the Seattle streets, four feet below her. The tail of her own black duster rustling in the wind. Indiscriminate shapes, the people made curious by her odd actions, by the cross in her hand.

Fast, one-handed – she’s done this before, many times, _every_ time, actually – Faith lashes the cheap brass cross, eighteen inches from scalloped top to bottom and ten across the armpiece, to the fire escape with two pieces of good, heavy wire.

This is to let them all know that she knows. After the meltdown, the vampires mostly hit the suburbs, the small towns, Sunnydale-sized, where they lived like Carpathian kings, ruling their tiny empires in the way that vampires did. Whole chunks of the country were lost, just plain...disappeared. While the humans are moving in toward the cities, any way they can, desperate and terrified of being, for the first time in living memory, _unreachable_, it’s easy, sickeningly easy, to forget that there is anyone left on the fringes. Easy never to ask yourself what happened to Emporia, Kansas while you’re scrabbling to make ends meet in L.A. Faith has been traveling from one end of the country to the other, ever since the EMP went off, and she _knows_.  She knows the way it all lies in waste and ruins, between Ohio and Colorado. The Badlands, she calls it in her own mind. Half the country, a hell reclaimed by the demon princes.

And nobody knows; it’s like another hemisphere. The world has gotten so fucking huge since the first time Faith lit out across country, Boston to California in a more-or-less crow-flying line.

This is to let them know, to let whoever and whatever sees it _know_.  That she knows they’re out there.

_How they all got so _old_, Faith will never understand. She’s still twitchy, still a runner. She likes her feral, fast-paced life. The surprises, the hunger, the danger, the weird beauty of the countryside and the breathless, nihilistic defiance of the urban fortresses. The contacts, the legwork, the chase._

_It’s good to have places to go back to, though, to unwind in. Sure. She likes the down times, but the longer she lives, the more these old friends who put her up three times a decade when she blows through town seem..._old_. Weary. Wearying._

_But then, they don’t have Faith’s gift for outrunning the past. They have to live with where they’ve been, what they came from, in a way that Faith just doesn’t, not 99% of the time. That’s the wearying part. The way they remind her how much of her life lies way, way behind her. Even the things that seem the most solid, that give her the most comfort when she’s on the move, are, amazingly, not there anymore. Not when she stops to look for them._

_When she stops to look around, she finds that she misses them all – Wesley and Giles and Willow and Oz, of course, because they’re dead and gone, long since. But she even misses the ones who survive, who have, on their own timetables, come to remember her as a friend; black sheep, maybe, but someone who’s been there in a crunch or two, someone you can only vaguely remember why it’s weird to be trusting with your life. She misses them when she walks out the door after they put her up for a while, and it takes more walking each time before the lure of their niceness fades from her mind. Tara, Xander, Riley, but of course Angel and Cordelia most of all._

_Most of all, the two of them. Damn, but Faith loves them, she _loves_ them, and it blows her mind that she can say that now, about anyone at all. If any pull on earth could ever be as strong on Faith as the wanderlust, she knows it would be the idea that she could scrunch herself into their little routine._

_But they’re the oldest, by far. They’re fucking little old women, puttering around their Orange County home, Angel in his kitchen, Cordelia in her garden. When Faith is there, she sits on the swingset in the park across the street, and the three of them just fall into rhythm together. They don’t have to talk; they just _are_ in rhythm, aware of each other, growing where they’re planted. Faith has very ambivalent feelings about retirement, but if it does happen to her, if that’s the way her hand gets played out, then it’s good to know she can just dive right in, that it won’t throw anyone’s balance if she goes to stay with the two of them and just _stays_._

_Someday, sure. Maybe. But right now Faith is on a visitor’s pass when she goes there, and they all understand why, just as sure as they understand everything else about each other. It’s because Faith is still fascinated by the world, still starving for it, actually. Angel was tired of it all many years ago, and Faith isn’t one to really blame him. It’s hard enough just to wrap her mind around the idea that this is a guy who’s going to see his three-hundredth birthday, assuming he keeps an eye on that cholesterol count of his. And all Cordelia’s ability to want things seemed to dry up and blow away when Charles died._

_She wonders what it’s like, to come that late to love, and to get used to it before you lose it. Faith remembers being in love, when she was young and hot-blooded. When she didn’t define her whole life by being the oldest, the big sister, the one who – watches? Is that what she is now – Watcher?_

_The witness. The one who inherited the history, and then lived long enough to remember._

It’s the candles that draw them, like moths to the – yeah, well, _duh_.  _Like_ flame. They _were_ flames, of course. Faith had always had a good, healthy reverence for fire. Maybe all humans did. After all, not even a Slayer could have been much help in fending off the demons back before there was at least fire. That was the beginning of resistance, the Normandy Beach of the war for earth.

She sets out the candles around the base of the cross, giving each one a name as she lights it.

Buffy. Erica. Chelsea. Jamie. The lost girl – the one Faith had never been able to find. Tory. Chioma. Jacqueline. And the last candle, which Faith leaves unlit, for the current Slayer, wherever the hell she is. Seattle, hopefully.

Other people will come here, over and over. They’ll replace the candles when they burn or are blown out, and Faith knows that they do it with their own names in mind. Nobody remembers these women, nobody learns the Slayers’ names, even though they all owe their best and their worst days to one or all of them. Nobody but Faith can list them all off, and even she’s missing two. But there are so many dead, and Faith knows how it can feel like the end of the world even when it, technically, isn’t (she thinks of Cordelia Gunn, she thinks of Tara Rosenberg, she thinks of Giles’ face when Buffy died and Buffy’s face when Dawn did), and she’s not the only one who needs something remembered that probably can’t ever be, not like it really deserves to be.

So she builds these little altars, and then she abandons them. Her gift to a new city. Everywhere she goes, Faith leaves behind her these little cemeteries. Everywhere she goes, death has always gone with her. She’s old enough, now, to know: that_ is _the gift.

That even death doesn’t travel alone.

In the distance, Faith hears the seismic purr of a motorcycle.

_In prison, she learned the importance of routine. Restrictions on her freedom were oddly welcome; they removed the burden, that Faith hadn’t even known she was carrying, of having to _be_ somebody. In prison, she ate with everyone else, slept when everyone else slept, watched the same tv shows, played the same card games. For once, she was as much piece-of-the-whole, an insider, as she had ever been. Just one of the girls. Prisoner 00W891._

_It took away the pressure of choosing badly. Of wasting her life through stupidity and weakness. Sure, she wasted a few years behind bars – but had the choice been hers, what _else_ would she have done with those years? Run loose, gotten her own way, been fucked, hurt the ones she loved, indulged, lashed out, wasted time – just wasted everything._

_No discipline back then. She’d been all feeling, all desire, and it was funny how something so minor as having a lights-out time fixed every day, _every single day_, at nine o’clock could have changed her, but it did. Changed her down to the heart._

_That’s what was with the rituals now. Discipline. The routine. She wasn’t a control freak or anything. She just knew damn good and well what sort of a person she was when no one and nothing was at the controls. A void, a black hole, taking everything to her and then tearing it apart and never filling up inside. Pure chaos._

_She’d been, whaddathey call it, _institutionalized_.  Inside. Like, when she got out, real life had seemed too disorganized, too illogical, and she wondered how people _dealt_ with it. Why they weren’t all crazy._

_Why nobody else seemed to go crazy like her. What the fuck was her problem, anyway? Billions of people on this planet, doing their thing, and she of all people should’ve known exactly what her thing was, what with spending a lifetime doing nothing but thinking about herself, and she didn’t, she just didn’t. Didn’t know the ropes, didn’t have anyplace to go or any reason to get up in the morning and face two thousand of the tiny, daily decisions that she’d all but forgotten how to make. What to wear, what to eat, whether to smile or frown, who the hell she was._

_When she went back to Angel, she thought he’d have some great wisdom, hard-earned and road-tested, or that he’d at least give her a place to stay and maybe let her do some legwork for his agency, like some surveillance or whatever. Make her part of the system he had going, give her something to go on again. But instead, he just looked at her thoughtfully, and he didn’t say anything about darkness or redemption or suffering. He just said, "Have you thought about getting some therapy?"_

_And she’d laughed and laughed. Because it was so normal, so human. And she had been human – all through those first, formative sixteen years, she hadn’t been a Slayer or a monster or anything else. Just a human animal, and if she was broken, well, why not just straight-up _fix_ it, just like anyone else would have to?_

_She went to hypnotherapy, because, man, it just _sounded_ cool. And it was. She hadn’t uncovered any kind of crazy, repressed memories or anything, but she had learned to take herself back to where she could see the past more clearly. Remember how it all went down, where she made the turns that took her here, and finally she understood that her choices were more than chaos. Finally, finally, she started to say hello to the things that had been driving her desperately all this time._

_So by the time everything was cut and shuffled, that was what redemption meant. Learning how much power to give the past – not so little that you were blind to the ways it used you, not so much that you turned into its whipping girl. That was the deal with the rituals too, with the memorials and the little portable monuments. That was the deal Faith cut with her own past, the discipline they entered into together: this far, no farther. I give you this. You take nothing else from me._

_With all the authority in the world, or at least with no one around to take her on about it, Faith could say that it was the only way to become an _old _Vampire Slayer. Draw your lines, protect your turf, and then go where the mood takes you. Control yourself, but not in a brittle way. Give Destiny a little breathing room, but never, ever get taken. Learn to take up the sword without falling on it._

_It meant more choices than ever before, constant decision, perpetual motion, life lived inside a verb. It meant leaving prison, this time for good._

She’s grown keener, more adept, as she’s aged. She is a fine-tuned device, the perfect huntress, and when she catches her first glimpse of the bike and the girl, Faith sees much more clearly than any mere human ever could.

Below her, she can see the raw strength and precision that the rider uses to control the dangerous tilt and spin of her bike. It looks easy at first glance, but Faith is aware of how much muscle she’s putting into this joyride, and of how much she’s holding back, too. Light plays off the chrome, and everything else is black – the bike, the hair, the leather, the road underneath, marked with its pools of standing rainwater and oil. When she skids the bike out to a quick stop, underneath Faith’s fire escape, dirty water splashes up in a dark wave, and the girl tosses her hair back with unconscious, animal grace, shaking herself clean. She’s aware of Faith, too, and the way Faith is balanced with perfect nonchalance on the very edge of the fire escape, elbows resting lightly behind her on the rail, almost floating there with nothing but her own muscle and her own sense of balance to hold her in place.

There’s something just plain not natural about them both, and they both know it, and so does the whole damn neighborhood. People begin to disappear, sensing something just a little too eerie, something bound to lead to craziness.

"You new here?" the young one asks, suspiciously, the implication being, _You have one chance to give me a good reason why you’re out so far from home._   In this day and age, a person didn’t just wander the streets alone at night, not if they were right in the head.

"Just got into town," the older one admits, pleasantly enough.

"Tourist?" She clearly doesn’t believe it. She says it like it’s a one-liner.

Faith smiles, preternaturally attentive eyes taking in the girl’s defensiveness, her stiff, mechanistic grace, contrasted to her warm Latina skin and her lush mouth. "I’m looking for someone. Called the Dark Angel."

The girl snorts, tosses her head angrily, an agitated young colt. "Well, guess what? She doesn’t hire out for parties."

"Okay by me," Faith assures her. "I never offer to pay."

All the banter is just so much filler, like packing styrofoam. The real event here is, they’re going to fight. That’s always the first step; it’s just the language Slayers speak. No surprises there.

But still, it’s always exciting. Visceral. Faith jumps to the ground in a swirl of coat, and reverses her momentum the minute she touches the ground, a high, narrow little hop that puts her shockingly close, toes of her boots perched right there on the handlebars of the bike. She smiles, face-to-face with a very surprised young Slayer, and the face in question is sweeter and more sensual even than Faith had first realized, even as her surprise is morphing into anger. She looks just like all of them do in the beginning – tough yet waiflike, invincible but totally fucking lost and alone. "Name’s Faith," she offers genially.

Those remarkable lips quirk into a barely amused little smile. "Max," she says by way of introduction, before hauling off and punching Faith in the nose.

Faith, having put herself in a spot with not much of anyplace to go, just takes the punch, lets its force knock her back off the bike. She rolls and comes up, and her leg follows through automatically, her ankle catching Max in the side of the head, because of course the younger one has followed through herself; she’s right there, throwing herself into the fight, and it must feel for her just as good as it does for Faith. Faith can hardly believe how this elemental thing can keep feeling so damn _good_, no matter how many times it happens.

Throwing your punches easy at first, then faster and harder as you realize that, yeah, she can block that. No sweat. Ducking, before you’re really sure that the sole of her foot is coming right at the center of your chest, and grabbing the leg as you come back up, because she didn’t expect you to be that quick, so she didn’t pull back in time.

And then they get a bead on each other, and they’re expecting fast and hard, each knows that by the time she strikes, the other will be there to block, except when she isn’t. Hit, hit, hit, faster and faster, until instinct and body memory scream through her, consume her like flames. She senses, rather than sees, the difference between soft tissue and hard bone when her attacks connect, and her brain files away the stings and bruises her own body is reporting. It’s something to think about later, after the fight.

The fight is everything, just for a few minutes, and there’s nothing, never has been anything like fighting with a Slayer in Faith’s life. It’s the one thing she hasn’t been able to find a passable replacement for. After all, in place of love she has had friendship, and in place of peace she has had power. Innocence, after it’s lost, can be mocked up again for display purposes; energy and enthusiasm look a lot the same, even feel the same, sometimes. And if Faith has had to go without the occasional pleasure during her restless, roaming life, she’s made up for it with other pleasures.

But there’s no substitute for this, for the wrathful purity of competition against one of her own kind. It’s no wonder, heady as it is, that it’s so easy to go too far with it. To be jealous of every inch of ground you lose, and to want beyond all reason whatever it is that she has and you don’t.

She wants Max’s respect – needs it, if she’s going to get through in time to teach her the ropes. That’s the job. That’s why they have to fight.

She wants Max’s _everything_, wants to win out over her, wants to take take take what should be hers, to wipe out this unsettling paradox, two Chosen Ones. She wants to play keep-away, to possess whatever it is that Max holds most dear, because she deserves it, she’s earned it, she’s the god. damned. Slayer, and _that’s_ really why they have to fight.

The true and naked, cynical and uncivilized, perfectly honest reason that two Slayers always fight each other. No question, no quarter, no way out.

Faith has played this game before. Luckily, the first time was the worst time, and everything since then has been child’s play.

_They often talk in oblique, ambiguous double-entendres, just sort of lazily tonguing their way around the attraction. They want each other, have always been attracted, but it cuts deeper every year, as they grow more entwined and more alike – as Faith grows up. In a way, it cuts too deep to act on._

_You don’t just fuck around with a guy like Angel. You never fuck with a friend – that way, Faith knows, lies hell._

_So they never fuck _around_, they never fuck _with_ each other, but sometimes they fuck. Now and then, she catches that stray half come-on that Angel tosses past her, and she doesn’t let it go with a grin. She steps right on up to the plate, takes hold of him by the shirt, and says, "Watch out, boyfriend. You’re turning me on, here."_

_And for a guy who was a spree-killing rapist bloodsucker all through the Victorian Era, Angel is pretty damn Victorian. He blushes, intrigued and embarrassed by her sudden closeness, and so Faith just takes over, running her hands over his chest, nuzzling the hammering pulse in his neck, smelling him, worshiping him. Oh, yeah, she’s a complete and total _dork_ when it comes to this man. He’s been with her so long, _with_ her, her oldest and truest ally, and he’s so handsome and earnest and careful, goddamit, he’s her fucking _hero_, which is totally pathetic and totally inescapable._

_Usually he just folds, lets her do whatever she’s going to do. He’s just a man, after all, a perfectly ordinary human man, and he wants what he wants, even though a big part of him retains that residual terror of wanting._

_He put up a little fight the first time after Cordelia moved in, no doubt worried about the thickness of his walls and the mortifying thought of eating breakfast with Cordelia smirking at him across the cereal – or maybe worried that he shouldn’t be happy like this while she was still weak from grieving. "Faith," he tried to say, grabbing for her wrist, pushing her back but not really pushing. "Come on, let’s not–"_

_"Angel. Shut the fuck up."_

_So he did, he shut them both up by kissing her, and even though she’d had her share of men and women before, Angel included, there’s something about that one kiss that hits Faith where she lives, to this very day. Long and breathy, earnest and careful, it left her suspended in midair, blind as a bat but utterly safe and warm from the inside out, and when he pulled his mouth away, she actually _whimpered_, she was that far gone. "Goodnight," he said._

_"That’s your idea of a _goodnight kiss_? Nu-_uh_, Daddy."_

_"Faith!" A little shocked. She grinned at him, wondering why a harmless little Electra complex always gave older men the wig. What did they think the attraction was, anyway, if not chromosomes looking for a good daddy for the next generation and the primitive brain looking for a better daddy here and now, one who can fix a heart that got broken practically right out of the starting gate?_

_But a little Darwinian reality-check wasn’t really enough to make Angel’s libido keep pace with his better judgement, and she could feel him softening, his defenses falling away, as she brushed the tips of her fingers along the fine skin around Angel’s eyebrow and temples and down the side of his face. "Don’t get all crazy on me, Angel. I bet it’s been even longer for you than it has for me, am I right?"_

_He smiled, a little sheepishly, and she knew right away that she had him. "I’m...I’m used to it."_

_"News flash: you don’t have to be used to it. Not anymore."_

_"I know."_

_"Yeah, you know. So you wanna tell me why you’re making the easiest thing in the world so goddamn difficult?"_

_Instead of telling her, he let Faith kiss him back, and then it was easy again, one long, smooth blur of heat and smooth skin and strength and the way they fit together, and fuck yeah, Cordelia could probably hear them, they could hear Faith in Hollywood, it felt so damn good, and the way Angel growled made her shake._

_And unlike with everyone else Faith had ever tried it with, the part afterward, the part where she stayed, was easy with Angel, too. She just fell over right there on top of him, bedded down on the broad expanse of Angel’s warm body, and let him pull the covers up over them both and turn off the lamp._

_Being a Slayer, and a great believer in unseen things in the darkness, Faith took drowsy stock of what she could sense without seeing, all around her. Angel’s heartbeat, Angel’s sweat, Angel’s scent. His large hands, fidgeting with the blankets, rubbing her back, petting her hair. Air conditioning kicking on, the creak of an old, settling house, the dim smell of the curry they’d had for dinner coming from the kitchen. And Buffy; Faith realized, almost serenely, that she was aware of Buffy’s sudden, distinctive _presence_, and a whole host of attendant emotions, a complicated stir-fry of love and jealousy and bitterness and longing._

_Same old song, the endless war; they were doomed to it, death notwithstanding, for as long as each of them had, easily, the one thing that was so necessary and so impossible for the other. Buffy’s easy self-confidence, her groundedness, her surety when it came to right and wrong, us and them, the way each choice was clear to her. Faith’s easy bravery, the way she could face a demon now and then, when she had to, and still get over her own fears. Buffy never had that oubliette, that place where she could send the nastiness after she was done with it, keep it out of her daily life. Dying once had poisoned her with a gnawing fear of death, losing Angel had poisoned her with a gnawing fear of loneliness, and Faith didn’t really think she’d gotten a good handle on the scope and depth of Buffy’s fears, not by a longshot._

_And then there was Angel, who was, of course, more than just a metaphor or a psychological construct. He was their lover. Buffy’s and Faith’s. Figure _that_ one out: was he the thing that separated them, or the thing that bridged the gap? Walk it all backwards, and there was Angel: she tried to seduce Angel, and the mask of her friendship with Buffy fell away. She tried to poison Angel, and the long fight turned bloody and fatal. She tried to hunt down Angel, and Buffy turned up to protect him. She learned to love Angel, and that was what it was. The way she won what Buffy valued most, took what Buffy wanted and couldn’t have, like it was nothing, like it was easy. The way she lost her last chance to tell Buffy the truth about their war – that it was necessary, because the three of them were all in love with each other, and the world wasn’t big enough to hold that in._

_Wonderful as they both were, Buffy and Angel, they weren’t brave like Faith. They would never have been willing to face up to that simple fact, not unless she forced them to. And she never had, and never would. Angel and his redemption – Buffy and her certainty – Faith and her courage. They all had what they needed. Win, win, win. Buffy was dead, Angel was mortal, Faith was the oldest of her kind, and the love thing? The moment for bringing that out into the light had come and gone, so Faith just hung onto it, with the memory of all her other dead things._

The girl is good, but Faith is no girl. She’s better; she’s God’s perfect killing machine, with decades of practice behind her. There’s never been a Slayer like her before, and she doesn’t really know if there will ever be one again.

In short, she kicks Max’s ass. As it should be.

Faith steps over her casually while she’s still flat on her back, breath knocked out of her. One boot to one side of the girl, the other to the other, and Faith adjusts her khakis and casually sinks down into a crouch, resting her elbows on her knees, lacing her fingers together, balanced up on her toes. One of her Slayers used to call it her Prophecy move, because of the movie where Christopher Walken played an angel.

Angels again. Angels fucking _everywhere_.

"Now, just relax," she orders in her Watcher voice, catching Max by the wrist when her arm starts to move again. "Relax. I’m here to help you." She pulls out a wooden stake, and lays it in the girl’s hand. Instinctively, her fist closes around it, and she frowns in confusion.

"What’s–"

"It’s what you use to kill vampires."

"_Vampires?_  Lady, what the fuck are you, _crazy_?"

She’s been here before; she’s very sure of herself. "No. I’m a Vampire Slayer, just like you are. How old are you, seventeen? I was fifteen when it happened to me, and I had no idea what the hell was going on."  _I didn’t know for years_, she thinks, but she keeps that to herself.

"Okay. I’m going to spell this out for you before you get the fuck off of me. Nothing _happened_ to me. Got that? Nothing _happened_ to me, and nothing is _going on_, so if you want to go again, let’s go, and if not, why don’t you fuck on off?"

Faith snorts. "Uh-huh. Listen, Max, do you think any _human_ could fight me off like that? You may think I’m crazy, but then what does that make you?"

She’s a pretty girl, exotic looking, but very childlike, except in the eyes. "Whatever happened to you when you were a kid, lady, that’s not my problem. I know what I am."

"Yeah? So hit me. What are you?"

"I’m a weapon, engineered by the United States military, built from the ground up and raised in a training compound. I’m a fucking a-bomb, all right? What are you, the humanity police?" She stops abruptly, and her eyes betray surprise; she doesn’t know why she admitted that, except that her internal balance is completely thrown off by the introduction of a wild card like Faith into her life.

Faith knows exactly how she feels.

There’s a little part of her head that’s trying to answer questions. Military – engineered – they built some kind of Slayer? The Initiative – what could Riley tell – _fuck_, still missing a goddamn _Slayer_....

But mostly, inside, she’s screaming like Seattle, rage and fear splitting her open from the inside. Because she _tries,_ she really does try, she studies what they send her to study, she knows how to network and run background checks and do the legwork, she’s even fucking patient about it. She asks questions, looks before she leaps, stays on the move but doesn’t run off. She even fucking _prays_, but it doesn’t help. There’s still more things in heaven and earth than she can fathom, still a whole world out there that she doesn’t understand, and how the hell is she supposed to do her job like this? Blindfolded, fucking ignorant. The oldest Slayer, big sister, the one who is supposed to help guide the others, and she just doesn’t know anything, have any answers, even know what is possible.

She keeps trying, but she doesn’t feel like she’s getting any wiser. She still doesn’t have that perfect center, that knowledge that she’s doing the right thing and that it’s all falling into place around her. She pretty much just feels like she’s chasing her own tail.

Leveled by this in a way that no fight could ever bring her down, Faith stumbles backward, almost crab-walking back away from this girl, this whole new deal. "I’m sorry," she mumbles. "You’re not who I was looking for. I have to – find –"

Have to find a _clue_. Have to start all over at square one.

Have to face the fact that she was losing another one, that there was a Slayer out there fighting blindfolded, a Slayer who would probably die because Faith couldn’t get to her in time. Because her witness-watcher-sister-savior didn’t know what the fuck she was _doing_.

She tries to get up, but the weakness has spread out from her imperfect center, infecting her whole body, and she just can’t. She stays down on the alley ground, curling her knees up against her body, hiding her face, wanting to kill and wanting to vanish.

Slayers were chosen in order to fight and die. Maybe she should just have _done_ that, just Slayed and Slayed until she died like the rest of them, instead of shifting gears, going into self-preservation mode in order to pass on whatever ragged shreds of knowledge she could claim to have. Slayers were _not_ meant to be Watchers. They were not meant to be thirty-nine years old.

Christ, what if she _couldn’t_ die? What if a Slayer could be _killed_, but couldn’t just age and die?

What if she had to make the choice herself, how long to hang here freelancing, when to bow out and let another Slayer come along – another Slayer who wouldn’t know half what she did, wouldn’t know where to go or what to do, or even that there was another one out there like her? How the _fuck_ could she make a decision like that without screwing it up? And screwing up a decision like that – well, hell, it could destroy the world, couldn’t it?

Great, just great. Humanity’s future hanging by a thread, and who was holding the scissors?

_Me._

_Me._

_Help me...._

But there was no one to ask for help. No Watchers, no angels, no second Slayer that Faith could see. She was alone, brutally alone, and all the people who had once been her friends were either rotting in the ground (those of them who’d left much in the way of _bodies_ behind) or long past their own last curtain call. Retired, their wars over at last, while Faith just kept going, because she didn’t know what else to do. Because of things that drove her – things like wanting to make a dead girl and an aging detective fucking _proud_ of her.

She can hear Max getting up, and the creak of leather as she swings her leg over the motorcycle. In the strained, post-leather pause, Faith looks up, to see that the girl is still holding the stake, staring at it carefully. She meets Faith’s eyes.

"Vampires, huh?"

Faintly, Faith tries to smile, and she mimes a stabbing motion. The thirty-second Slayer training course. Diplomas by mail. "Through the heart. Fire and decapitation work too."

"Crosses?" She nods up vaguely in the direction of the cross Faith has hung.

"Wouldn’t count on ‘em. Might buy you a little time."

Max puts the stake inside her leather jacket. "Thanks for the tip."

She doesn’t say it totally sincerely; there’s something cocky about this kid, like she can’t really imagine anyone can teach her anything about fighting, but whatever. Briefly, Faith thinks about following up – maybe hanging for a while. Because Slayer or not, this girl is the goods, Faith can tell. She can do the job, if she has to. If she has Faith to show her how.

The candles she’s lit are still burning. And there’s still a girl out there, a girl who was human just a few months ago, and she’s not going to live if Faith doesn’t get up off her ass in this alley and go find her.

A girl who is what she is because Buffy Summers died.

Just like Faith.

And Max may be a killer, she may be the goods, but she’s not a part of that, and so Faith lets her ride off. Because she’s not looking for another Faith, for another dark-eyed, cocky, indestructible hellion with a strange designer drug running through her veins, part paranoia, part bloodlust, part hope.

She’s looking for something else entirely, something she catches a glimpse of in each new Slayer, but only a glimpse. She’s living forever, following each link in the long chain of lives, looking for the right altar to lay down her greatest sacrifice to the past.

_I always, always loved you_, she’s gonna say when she gets there.

And the new girl is gonna look up at her with wide, brimming eyes, and say, _I’m glad_.

Curtain. Cut. Wrap. Goodnight.

 

"Silence"  
Delerium, _Poem_

Give me release  
Witness me  
I am outside  
Give me peace  
Heaven holds a sense of wonder  
And I wanted to believe that I’d get caught up  
When the rage in me subsides


End file.
